Phillips Outlines Project Fusion

Project Fusion was another key theme of Phillips keynote.
Fusion is a massive middleware undertaking in which Oracle is tying together its many technology acquisitions.

Oracle envisions Fusion as the next step in an evolution that started with monolithic applications into which presentation logic, business logic and information stores were all wedged.

From those monoliths technology went to client/server, which parsed presentation to a client and divided business logic between client and server.
Then came the Internet with three-tier applications: presentation, application layer and databases.
The next step in the evolution to modular components is Fusion, which relies on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based applications.
At the base of the Fusion stack lies Oracles version of the database grid, where many computers function as one through Real Application Clusters.
Oracle has been hyping this database bedrock since it rolled out its 10g architecture some two years ago, promising that grid would eliminate single points of failure, enable pay-as-you-go computing, provide load balancing, entail no application changes and ensure centralized management.
The next layer above grid in the Fusion architecture, Phillips said, are the applications themselves, including those from Oracle, customized applications and applications from ISVsessentially, any applications enterprises want to service-enable, Phillips said.
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On top of the application layer is the Fusion service registry, where application services are published.
On top of that is the Fusion service bus: the highway for message routing and transformation.
Over that is the business level, where services can be orchestrated into different applications and where business processes can be discovered or changed.
This SOA-based componentization will enable far greater visibility into what, exactly, applications are up to, Phillips said.
"Applications in the past have been rough models of what actual business process was," he said. "You couldnt see it all. Now you can see it all. We generate BPEL language with Oracle a native BPEL engine so you can improve [services]."
The next layer up is the business benefit layer, or what Oracle is calling the Fusion effect. It includes BI (Business Intelligence) and activity monitoring and will provide real-time analytics and transactions with context.
Finally, on top of everything is the unified portal.
At this point, Fusion Middleware, which Oracle promises is hot-pluggable, is being used by some 26,600 customers, Phillips said.
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Lisa Vaas is News Editor/Operations for eWEEK.com and also serves as editor of the Database topic center. Since 1995, she has also been a Webcast news show anchorperson and a reporter covering the IT industry. She has focused on customer relationship management technology, IT salaries and careers, effects of the H1-B visa on the technology workforce, wireless technology, security, and, most recently, databases and the technologies that touch upon them. Her articles have appeared in eWEEK's print edition, on eWEEK.com, and in the startup IT magazine PC Connection. Prior to becoming a journalist, Vaas experienced an array of eye-opening careers, including driving a cab in Boston, photographing cranky babies in shopping malls, selling cameras, typography and computer training. She stopped a hair short of finishing an M.A. in English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She earned a B.S. in Communications from Emerson College. She runs two open-mic reading series in Boston and currently keeps bees in her home in Mashpee, Mass.